The Curriculum With My Name

My department chair sold my curriculum for $499 a seat, but the learning management system still put my name inside every exported module.

I discovered the workshop on a bus shelter near the University of Wisconsin campus.

**DESIGNING THE CIVIC CLASSROOM WITH DR. MARTIN BELL.**

The sample slide showed my "Budget Council" simulation, including a typo I had made at 2:14 one morning: *municipal bond yeilds.*

Bell had corrected *yields* in the paid version. Everything else was mine.

I taught four sections of introductory public policy as an adjunct. I earned $4,800 per course and shared an office with two broken chairs. Over three years, I built thirty-six modules: Madison snow-emergency data, a zoning-hearing role play, rubrics, quizzes, captioned lectures, accessibility descriptions.

Bell had praised them in email.

*Leah, your materials are unusually scalable. Please keep them within our departmental shell so we can preserve continuity.*

I had mistaken "preserve continuity" for respect.

The department owned certain course-use rights under my contract, but the paid external workshop raised different questions: authorship, revenue, scope, and false attribution. I did not assume outrage was a legal theory. I downloaded my appointment letters, intellectual-property policy, emails, original files, and the LMS activity report available for my own courses.

The report showed each module created under LEAH.ORTIZ. At 6:03 a.m. on April 14, MARTIN.BELL exported the entire shell.

Two weeks later, the continuing-education office received his workshop package.

I scheduled a meeting.

Bell closed his office door and placed both palms on his desk.

"The university owns instructional material."

"Then why is your name the only author?"

"The workshop is adapted."

"You changed my typo."

He flinched.

"I can add an acknowledgment in future cohorts."

"And the current revenue?"

"Adjuncts are paid to teach."

There it was: not a misunderstanding, but a hierarchy spoken plainly.

My default strategy was to make myself indispensable and hope indispensability matured into security. Bell had benefited from that belief. Every extra module demonstrated I could deliver tenure-track labor without tenure-track leverage.

I filed an internal authorship concern and received a reply from Dean Celeste Voss's office: departmental materials were being used under institutional authority; no action warranted.

Then my fall sections dropped from four to two.

Bell said enrollment projections had changed.

The schedule metadata showed my sections had been reassigned to a new full-time lecturer who would use my shell.

I contacted the faculty senate's academic freedom committee, the adjunct union, and the continuing-education office. I stayed precise. I had evidence of creation and attribution, evidence of export, and a disputed policy interpretation. I did not call it criminal theft.

Senator Amina Cho offered me ten minutes at the September meeting.

"What outcome do you want?" she asked.

"My name on my work and my share of the workshop revenue."

"Only yours?"

The question irritated me because I was tired of institutions turning individual harm into a seminar topic. Still, I reviewed workshop listings.

Bell's was one of eleven "innovation products" launched that year. Seven used material developed primarily by adjuncts or staff. None named them on the sales page.

The pattern was larger, but Bell had still chosen to participate.

I built a presentation with side-by-side modules, timestamps, emails, the export event, and policy language. No adjectives. At slide twelve, I proposed credit, compensation, and an approval process for commercial reuse.

The morning of faculty senate, Lake Mendota wind shoved cold rain sideways. Bell found me outside the meeting room holding a paper cup of coffee.

"You should read this before you speak."

He handed me a memo marked **DEAN'S STRATEGIC INNOVATION TARGETS**.

Dean Voss required every chair to deliver three monetizable products before accreditation review. Departments missing the target would be labeled "low innovation." Bell's department would lose funding equivalent to twelve adjunct sections.

His handwritten notes filled the margin:

*Could use Leah's shell—with permission?*

Below that:

*CV: permission delays launch. Institutional work product. Proceed.*

Another email showed Bell objecting to sole attribution. Voss replied:

*Marketable workshops require senior-faculty authority. Do not complicate the public-facing brand.*

"Why didn't you show me?" I asked.

"Because I proceeded."

Bell's wife was undergoing treatment for multiple sclerosis. His chair stipend covered the part-time care that allowed her to stay home. Voss had warned that replacing him as chair would be "the easiest efficiency."

He had been squeezed.

He had also put his name over mine.

"You could have asked me," I said.

"If you said no, I would have had to choose."

"So you made sure I couldn't."

He nodded.

That changed Bell from engine to transmission. It did not make him innocent.

Inside, Dean Voss sat in the front row. The senate chair introduced Bell to present the workshop as evidence of innovation.

At roughly sixty percent, Amina called my name. My original slide deck would expose Bell cleanly, win sympathy cleanly, and let the dean condemn one chair for violating a system she designed.

I walked to the podium with Bell's memo in my hand.

I could not display it without confirming provenance and considering confidential personnel details. So I did not.

Instead, I began with records I could authenticate.

"Thirty-six modules in this paid workshop were created in my account," I said. "The issue before you is not whether Martin Bell clicked export. The issue is a commercialization process that rewards senior attribution while treating contingent creators as invisible institutional inputs."

The room changed.

I showed creation timestamps, LMS logs, emails, sales language, and seven other public workshop pages. I omitted private medical facts and did not speculate about threats. Then I asked the senate to preserve relevant records and commission a review independent of the dean's office.

Bell requested the microphone.

"Leah Ortiz created the underlying curriculum," he said. "I adapted and presented it. I accepted sole billing when I should not have. I support correcting the record."

Voss called the matter an operational misunderstanding.

Amina asked who established the innovation targets and attribution rules.

Voss's answer became part of the minutes.

The senate did not hold a trial that afternoon. It passed a preservation resolution and referred the policy questions to a committee including adjunct representation, faculty governance, accessibility staff, and counsel. My union filed a grievance concerning my course reductions and commercial use.

Evidence did what outrage could not: it separated claims.

The LMS logs established creation. The emails established knowledge. The public pages established attribution. The schedule history supported retaliation concerns. Bell's memo, later provided through the review process with appropriate redactions, connected the dean's metric to the choices beneath it.

The settlement credited me as lead curriculum designer on existing and future workshop materials. I received back compensation based on the workshop's net instructional revenue, and my two removed sections were restored with a multiyear appointment.

Bell kept his faculty position but stepped down as chair. He returned the supplemental workshop payment and issued a correction to past participants. He did not ask me to describe him as a victim.

Dean Voss remained through the accreditation review, under oversight. The university removed monetized-product counts from chair evaluations.

The new policy required written creator consent for external commercial use, named attribution standards, disclosed revenue terms, and prohibited employment penalties for declining. A repository now preserved contributor-level LMS logs instead of flattening every course into a department-owned shell.

I joined the implementation committee only after they paid me for the hours.

The next spring, I taught Budget Council again. On the first slide, beneath the title, I listed every graduate assistant, librarian, captioner, and instructor who had shaped the module.

My old strategy had been to make work too useful to discard.

My new one was to make authorship too visible to steal.